pipes the waiter tends, deftly adding char
coal bits with great iron tweezers.
Most of the all-male clientele come for the
gossip and backgammon; for me, it was the
panorama. As afternoon shadows cooled the
valley, pedestrians of half a dozen national
ities filled the noisy lanes below, narrowed
by shops overflowing with stacks of cooking
pots and china, overcoats, luggage, racks of
sandals. I finished my cup and, courage up,
descended into the calico scene.
Along King Faisal Street, past stalls of
goldsmiths and money changers, I rubbed
elbows with village women in richly embroi
dered dresses and merchants wearing three
piece suits with Arab headcloths, thumbing
prayer beads. Egyptian construction work
ers in long robes strolled arm in arm, lugging
shiny new stereos.
Under the slender minarets of Hussein
Mosque in rows of Arabic confectioneries,
pots of boiling syrup and rose water sweeten
the air to offer fresh baklava, sticky knafeh,
and borma, devastating rolls of sugared pis
tachios. I paused at one stall, a kind of Bed
ouin general store cluttered with kettles,
saddlebags, swords, raw wool, mouse
traps, and tambourines; another hung out
brightly colored rugs, handwoven by desert
dwellers. Nearby, a seller of holy books
wielded a feather duster on the gold and
green bindings of his Korans.
At the hillside roundabout called First
Circle, Amman levels offinto a middle-class
neighborhood of tidy stone houses. Ringing
for Jordan's small Christian minority-an
estimated 10 percent-church bells here al
ternate with calls from the minaret.
Past Third Circle lies opulent Zahran
quarter, stony fields where sheep grazed
when last I saw it 15 years earlier, now lined
with new embassies, government minis
tries, and palatial villas banked by gardens
of roses, jasmine, and bougainvillea.
Amman's new wealthy, the families of
bankers,
builders,
'and businessmen,
browse in the modern boutiques of Jebel
Amman or Western-style Shmeisani, where
they can try on $150 shoes at Raffaello's, or
pick up a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape at
the Piccadilly Supermarket.
Nearby, among modern banks, luxury
hotels, and apartment buildings, rise the fu
turistic white terraces of Shmeisani Center,
built by a Seoul company with its own crew.
The 20-story shopping and office complex
the Korean Pyramid, some call it-is one of
Amman's tallest. All this prosperity derives
from oil money, though Jordan has no wells
of its own.
"Our most important natural resource is
expertise," said Labor Minister Jawad al
Anani. I met the American-trained econo
mist at his new office in Shmeisani.
"Jordanians place high priority on educa
tion. Families scrape and sacrifice to get
their sons and daughters through school.
"As a result, today we have a talent sur
plus. Some 300,000 skilled workers-half
the Jordanian work force-are employed
abroad, mostly in Saudi Arabia and the
[Persian] Gulf states. The more than a bil
lion dollars a year they send home represents
Jordan's single biggest source of income.
"Unemployment is negligible. In fact, we
have to import laborers, 125,000-mainly
from Egypt."
AT BASMAN PALACE, overlooking cen
tral Amman, I was received by His Maj
esty King Hussein bin Talal. Fifteen
years had passed since we first met in
this small garden of pine and cypress; the
"boy king" I remembered had grown into
the elder statesman. The deep-voiced wel
come was just as warm, the handshake, iron
firm, but His Majesty struck me as older
than his 47
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